97 Million Downloads. Zero Sessions on What Agents Should Be Allowed to Do.

The MCP Dev Summit kicked off in New York today. 95+ sessions. Speakers from Anthropic, Datadog, Hugging Face, Microsoft, Google. Diamond sponsors: AWS, Docker, Workato, WorkOS.

The Model Context Protocol hit 97 million monthly SDK downloads. That’s not adoption. That’s infrastructure becoming invisible — the way TCP/IP did.

Here’s what the agenda covers: protocol evolution. Conformance testing. Security research. Scalable agent systems. Enterprise authentication.

Here’s what it doesn’t: what the agents should actually be allowed to do.

One session — exactly one — touches governance. It’s about authentication and access control. Important? Absolutely. Sufficient? Not close.

Authentication answers “who is this agent?” Governance answers “what should this agent do in THIS workflow, with THIS data, under THESE constraints?”

The first question has five enterprise-grade answers shipping this month. The second has none.

MCP is the plumbing. It’s extraordinary plumbing. But plumbing doesn’t decide what flows through it.

97 million downloads. Zero intelligence about what the rules should be.

That’s the gap nobody at the summit is talking about.